Kyle Oliver

Kyle Oliver:
I chose to do my dissertation as a podcast because I think doing participatory research, that is research with the people that we are studying and not just about them, means that their voices ought to be present in an authentic human way in the actual research artifacts that we are creating, as we do the research and share the research. You get to hear from the people who were there for me in their own words, and in their own voices, and in a way that captures something of the essence of Tapestry in a way that I think writing alone just never would've let me do.
I spent three or four years embedded with an organization called Tapestry, which is a foster youth mentoring organization on the West Coast. And really, my goal as an ethnographer embedded in that organization was to get to know the organization. They started out thinking that they would be a church plant. 
I'm a Protestant clergy person, and the folks who founded this organization are as well. They thought they were going to be starting a new church whose mission was caring for foster youth. Turned out it was comparatively easy to start a foster youth mentoring organization compared to starting a new church.
I'm a media education scholar working in faith and faith adjacent spaces, so the kind of primary purpose of my being there was to think about adapting some fairly traditional media education tools like digital storytelling to the context of this organization, so that the organization can understand its story and its identity, and share that more broadly.
So I spent this time with them, and was really just trying to get my head around what does it look like to do digital storytelling in this community. Along the way, Covid happened, and so there were lots of additional pivots that happened there.
But what we ended up with is a portrait of group-based media storytelling that I think fills potentially a real gap in the literature that is so focused in digital storytelling, on what it means when individuals tell their stories. I think we found that a group telling the story of their group identity was especially rich and interesting.
When we started, I kind of hoped against hope that I would be able to use the standard digital storytelling playbook, and that we might be able to actually convene a more traditional workshop experience where a number of people came together and told individual stories.
And what we discovered along the way was that didn't feel very authentic to the nature of this organization, which is all about convening community around these young people who don't always have a lot of community in their life. So the idea of isolating them and asking them to tell an individual story rather than the story of their experience with these mentors, it became really clear that that wasn't authentic, that it was going to be difficult to put together in the context of the normal rhythms of gathering of this organization.
And now for nothing, it would've been really expensive. One of the fascinating things I learned is that a really non-significant part of the budget of this organization is using the child-friendly car sharing service, because a lot of the young people in this organization need to get around the city to come to these large group gatherings. And they need to use this service that is like Uber, but with additional child protection procedures, and it's phenomenally expensive. And so to get the whole organization together for a day like that, it just wasn't feasible. 
The form that my dissertation took is actually a four episode podcast, so it is what I would want to call an ethnographic audio documentary. But the sound of it should, I think, be familiar to people who are used to long form storytelling in the podcast format. But I made a lot of adaptations to the format in order to accommodate all of the academic research traditions that you would expect to hear in a dissertation.
So an example of that would be there is a pretty deep engagement with the relevant literature along the way in this podcast. But instead of having a section called the literature review, each episode actually has a couple of tongue in cheek advertisements. "This episode is made possible by," and then a brief engagement with an important author whose work shaped my thinking.
And so there are a few folks out there, Daniel Makagon and Mark Neumann in particular, who are thinking about how audio recording traditions work together with traditions in ethnographic search. And so I found that to be a really rich jumping off point.
And then we just tried to make sense of, what does it look like to answer a series of social science research questions in the form of a series of stories? And in this case, there is an episode that introduces the project as a whole. And then there are three subsequent episodes devoted to each of the three research questions in the piece.
How I got there was being an active and interested podcaster and member of the Media and Social Change Lab, really as a participant in our spaces here at Teachers College, wanting to think about the possibilities for podcasting. Not just disseminating the results of research, but actually being involved in a more deep and intimate way in the research publishing and indeed process itself. It makes you think about research a little differently when you remember that the way you're going to be writing up this project is as a podcast. 
If I had to say why did we end up with a podcast format, I have to give a lot of credit to Dr. Ioana Literat who was one of my committee members, who knew about my passion for thinking about how podcasting might change some of our academic research practices. And who when I came to Teachers College after a year or so out on the West Coast to propose the dissertation said to me, "Kyle, what happened to the podcast part?" And really encouraged me not to let go of this thing that is a real passion of mine, but also I knew might make the project a bit more work. And I was really grateful for the nudge from Ioana to sort of follow my passion.
And I think it makes for a really compelling piece of ethnography, because if you think about a sort of common ad campaign on National public radio, for instance, audio has this affordance of taking us into a space in a powerful way. And especially in the final chapter of the dissertation where you actually get to take a seat around the table, as one of the groups from Tapestry sits with me and we work on putting their story together.
I think there's really this sense of being there that is really powerful. And telling audio-based stories about video-based media projects solves a few of the problems that have to do with things like research ethics. And for example, in this organization, it's definitely not okay for us to show the faces of the research participants. Not just because of academic practices, but because of rules that come from the foster system in this case. So audio.
And also, making this kind of video, images, voiceover, maybe a little bit of music, it's not a very visually engaging process. So you might think you tell a video story about a video production process, but there's not actually a lot to look at. And so what we landed on, this idea of telling an audio story about that video production process, I think actually ended up being pretty elegant and effective. 
I just found it deeply comforting as a human being, not for nothing as a preacher, to be able to bring the full range or fuller range of a different kind of expression that's possible when you use your voice. And I think maybe even more importantly, it meant that the voices of these other participants, and in many cases the voices of the scholars that I was drawing on, were all present. Becoming Tapestry is a very multivocal audio text. 
I do think it means something in terms of the human dimension of the project that we get to hear those people's voices. I think it gives them, and certainly it gave me a more sense of authentic ownership of the project. And storytelling is all about those intimate human moments of people being together, reflecting on their experiences. And that just comes through the human voice in a powerful way.
So a difference between a more traditional mode of publishing and the mode that I took was I think that I had to think really carefully about how to distribute the elements that you would expect to see in a piece of social science dissertation research. I spoke earlier about the lit review and the way that that got distributed over the course of a series of episodes in these tongue in cheek advertisements. But I think that that general principle is true through lots of the typical sections that you would expect to see in a traditional written dissertation.
So for another example, you often expect to see a kind of methodology section pretty early in a dissertation. And I just think when you're trying to draw somebody in to listen to four hours of audio, it's not really a winning proposition within the first 15 minutes or so of that, to be asking people to listen to a bunch of details about how many participants were in your study and how you collected and coded all the data. 
So there was a just in time-ness to how I tried to present the elements that made this project, I believe, a rigorous piece of research. But the just in time part helps it to also be a story that you would actually want to listen to, putting on your headphones and washing the dishes, or going for a walk, or engaging in many of the ways that we tend to engage with audio.
When I was thinking about the audience of this dissertation, I was definitely thinking of the folks whose job it was for me to serve in the years leading up to when I began my doctoral studies. So I had been working in a teaching and learning resource center at an Episcopal seminary, so mostly serving people who are religious educators in congregations, and regional groups of churches, and camps, and all the different places where religious education happens. 
And that's a really practitioner oriented vocation. And I didn't want to leave that when I started working on my dissertation. I wanted this research to matter to the people who formed me as a leader in religious education in my denomination.
I wanted them to be a part of this conversation. And there again, some of the affordances of podcasting I think lent itself well to wanting to do rigorous scholarship that would also be comprehensible and engageable to a more diverse and less academically specialized audience. 
Even a very deep dive into a very esoteric kind of academic sub-discipline is not going to work in podcast format if you don't find a way to make the voice of the project a little more accessible, a little more informal.
And so it's a chatty dissertation, and I think that that made it an easier sell when I sent it to some of my colleagues, my practitioner colleagues in the field. "Hey, check this out. It's not what you think a dissertation might be."
I do think that writing, writing in air quotes in this non-traditional way does pose some challenges as well. And a lot of that does have to do, I think, with the sort of discourse expectations of academia, and trying to get people to shift some of those expectations a little bit.
Obviously, I believe that we can do serious scholarship in a more informal tone of voice, with simpler sentence structures, with more accessible language. But it does sort of go against the grain of what a journal editor might expect, when you submit something that is meant to be a script for a piece of audio scholarship. And it sounds chatty. That informality might signal that you're not taking the venue seriously or that you're not paying much attention to what the genre traditions of research writing look like. And of course, I'm trying to pay attention and adapt according to different kinds of formats.
So I do think that a challenge of this kind of work overall is figuring out how to get the work a hearing, no pun intended, in the format that it's intended to be in. So I want to keep trying to get some bits of this work published in an audio phonic way.
I think there's plenty of writing that I can do about the project in a more traditional, written format. But having done this not just as an exercise, but out of my commitment and love for this kind of work, I'd like to try to see that through to some of the post dissertation aspects of how this work gets shared. 
The first piece of advice I would give to someone who wants to do multimodal research is to say find your people. And I mean that in a few different ways. Find your mentors and your forebearers in the tradition itself. And maybe we'll come back to thinking about some other scholars of multimodality and how they've pursued their work. But thinking carefully about how others have gone about multimodal research I think is really important. 
A second thing is finding peers. And I was really lucky to have a ton of peers in the Media and Social Change Lab and elsewhere at Teachers College, and in the podcasting community in the city where I was doing this research. Having peers who are willing to play around with these ideas in a low stakes way was really important.
But most important for last, get a supportive committee. And I was really, really fortunate that [inaudible 00:18:35] my dissertation advisor, Ioana Literat, my first reader, and Detra Price-Dennis. And they were sort of the core of my committee, and they were 100% on board with me doing this work.
And I think them being on board then helped others who were engaging with this work just step into the momentum that was already established by virtue of these significant scholars in these related fields really being excited about the project. So I just can't say enough for how important it was to have a supportive advisor and committee. 
I want to give a ton of gratitude to Daniel Makagon and Mark Neumann who have written this wonderful book called Recording Culture, and do some of the really important thinking about how does ethnography relate to some of these traditions of audio-based storytelling, oral history, folklore, music recording. This idea that sound expresses culture in really important ways I think just has a lot to teach us as ethnographers. I was stepping into a case that's already being made for the idea of ethnographic audio.
A second definite mentor text for me is a piece that lots of us in Media and Social Change Lab have probably engaged with, and it's Dr. John Jackson Jr's Ethnographic Filmflam. Hard to say, not flim-flam, but Filmflam, where he reflects on media making in the midst of ethnographic research, and what it means to really be in partnership with the participants in your study. And not always just taking, but also giving, as a researcher, spending time with a community. 
And that ended up being just a really important paradigm for me in my work was we were going to tell the kinds of stories that Tapestry as its members and the organization as a whole, the stories that they wanted and needed, and that would make a difference for their organization. And some of that is about fundraising, but some of that was about giving this mentor team that completed a full story with me the opportunity to really reflect on the journey they'd been on.
This was one of the very first young people to be connected with Tapestry. They had had a lot of mentors over the years, gone through some compelling experiences, including the death of a mentor, which was fairly uncommon in an organization that is mostly young adult mentors. This was an older person who died, and the team had to sort of process that together. And that experience loomed large in the story that they chose to tell.
And then as I said, I think it was really important that we told these stories in a way that was sort of, of Tapestry, and didn't try to force practices of media-based storytelling onto this organization that would just be really inauthentic to how this group works.
I mean, I mentioned that there's a sort of religious or faith adjacent, as I call it, perspective to this piece. And in a lot of ways, we thought about this as this non-traditional "church" coming to write some non-traditional "scripture." What are the stories that bind this group together? 
So of course, those stories needed to be of the community and a gift to the community. And I'm glad that because I needed to do this research in the course of completing a research program, this organization also got to bring into being some new media artifacts that will help their organization on their continued path to figuring out who they are and how best to serve their community. 
I wish I had discovered earlier what she believes, and this seems right, is the very first podcast dissertation. This is a work by Dr. Anna Williams called My Gothic Dissertation. And this is an English literature podcast, so quite different from my field. But I discovered it at the very end of my process, after the thing was basically already recorded and off to the committee. But I've spent a lot of time since thinking about how she and I solve similar problems in similar ways in many cases, of how do you do extended audio scholarship?
So just the opportunity to hear, or see, or experience others doing similar kinds of work, even if it's in another field and doesn't ultimately shape your thinking or practice in doing this differently, it's just rich, and fun, and opens up new ways of thinking about the work to have to have yours in conversation with others, which is part of why this crossmodal exhibition that we've gathered here to celebrate is I think going to be really rich. 
I think it's really interesting to use an occasion like this, an audio-based podcast to step back and ask some questions about the other kinds of ways that scholarship happens, because I think we sort of overestimate the predominance of the written page, in some ways in the day-to-day life of academics, and scholars, and researchers. A big part of what we do is talk in at least a slightly less formal way about our work at conferences, both guild based conferences, and maybe more popular, accessible kinds of gatherings.
And so for example, a lot of the audio from the scholars that I'm in conversation with figuratively came from recordings of them giving conference talks or giving talks to people who have invited them to address a particular group. Right? Elizabeth Drescher who studies the so-called nones, N-O-N-E-S, people who are disaffiliating from religious communities. She plays an important piece in the setup of the project for me.
And we get to hear Elizabeth Drescher's voice as she's speaking to a faith community. In this case, a humanist faith community about the future of religious faith in the US. It was fun within the dissertation proper to have some audio, both from scholars talking to scholars, and from scholars talking more broadly and popularly to the public.
And several of the interstitial bonus episodes that come along the way in this project I think have that kind of character as well. One of the bonuses is a conversation that I had with my colleague Jimmy Nagel, who studies disaffiliation among Catholic young people who attend Catholic parochial schools. 
So his work and mine have some things in common and some things quite different. And we were at a conference, I had my recorder. And after we gave our talks, we sat down and talked about how ideas were sort of in the same key, and what we might learn from each other, and play around with each other's work. And so that kind of playful, scholarly conversation that might happen in a lab, or at a conference, or in the context of a classroom, that was really rich.
The other thing is, most researchers are also teachers. And teaching, especially teaching today involves a whole lot of media making. And I'm really grateful that some pieces from this dissertation as media artifacts have ended up in my classrooms as well. And I think that's another place where there is some interesting modal transmediation as we move in and out of different settings and ask what multimodal scholarship has to inform those settings.
I guess by transmediation in this context, I just mean asking these critical questions about affordances and purposes, as we move in and out of different contexts with different communication or learning kinds of goals. And so it's interesting to think about the role that little excerpts from my dissertation play in my class teaching future religious educators how to do their work. It's interesting to think about how different pieces of the media that we created at Tapestry have made their way into the media ecology of that organization.
I always get a big smile on my face when I get an email from the organization to its members and supporters that shares a bit of one of the stories that we've created, or where I can see that they are already starting to play around a bit more with media-based storytelling in the organization. 
In some sense, this podcast is published, right? I'm not trying to get someone to turn Becoming Tapestry into a book, but I do think that some peer reviewed places to share about the research is something I'm working on, and frankly struggling with a little bit. But I think you do have to be a little bit tenacious and a lot bit patient, in trying to break some of these boundaries. And thankfully, I have good conversation partners, and I still feel optimistic that there are some possibilities. 
The other what's next is really that I do do a lot of teaching, and I think media will continue to be an important place of classroom learning. Media creation will be an important classroom learning activity. I teach at a couple of different seminaries, where students are reasonably open to the idea that as future faith leaders, an ability to participate in contemporary media ecosystems is a part of how they will be effective leaders. So that means we get lots of chances to playfully make media in the courses that I teach. 
And I'm especially grateful for that, because in a professional school context like seminary education, it can be hard to think about practice. So just like with teacher education, just like with nursing education, part of the knack of it is figuring out how to give people authentic practice within a classroom setting, and not just a clinical setting. 
And for me, networked publics and other media spaces are one of the ways that we can bring the real world in to the seminary classroom, and give people really authentic kinds of opportunities to practice some of the skills that will make a difference for their leadership in the future.